The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

In Amsterdam in 1990, I dwelled for a time on Spuistraat, a border street
on the western flank of the oldest part of the Inner City. Squeezed in between
the busy Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal (literally, on the “new side” of the
original settlement, in front of the old city wall) and the Singel (or “girdle,”
the first protective canal moat built just beyond the wall), Spuistraat runs
roughly north–south. It starts near the old port and the teeming Stationsplein,
where the Central Railway Station sits blocking the sea view, pumping
thousands of visitors daily into the historic urban core. At its halfway
point, Spuistraat is cut by Raadhuisstraat, the start of the main western
boulevard axis branching off from the nearby Royal Palace (once the town
hall, or raadhuis) and tourist-crammed Dam Square, where the city was born
more than seven hundred years ago in a portentous act of regulatory tolerance
(granting the local settlers toll-free use of the new dam across the Amstel
River, Amstelledamme becoming Amsterdam).
After passing the old canal house where I lived, the street ends in
what is simply called Spui, or “sluice,” once a control channel connecting the
Amstel and the older inner-city canal system with the great bib of concentric
canals that ring the outer crescent of the Inner City, or, as it is popularly
called, the Centrum. The Spui (pronounced somewhere in between “spay”
and “spy”) is now a short, broad boulevard lined with bookstores, cafés, a
university building, the occasional open-air art fair, and the entranceways to
several popular tourist attractions, ranging from the banal (Madame Tussaud’s)
to the enchanting (the Begijnhof and, just beyond, the Amsterdam
Historical Museum). The “city museum” offers the most organized introduction
to the historical geography of Amsterdam, with roomfuls of splendid
imagery bringing to life what you see first on entering: a panoramic
model that sequentially lights up the city’s territorial expansion in stages
from 1275 to the present. Just as effective, however, as a starting point for
an interpretive stroll through Amsterdam’s Centrum is the Begijnhof, or
Beguine Court.
The Begijnhof is a small window onto the Amsterdam mentalité,
that bewildering Dutch mix of the familiar and the incomprehensible that
so attracted Henry James in the 1870s and later inspired Simon Schama’s
brilliant portrayal of the “moralizing geography” of Dutch culture in its
seventeenth-century Golden Age, The Embarrassment of Riches. One enters
the Begijnhof through an arched oak door off Spui square, an innocently unmarked
opening to an enticing microcosm of civic refuge and peaceful
respite in a cosmopolitan Dutch world of ever-so-slightly repressive tolerance.
Before you is a neat quadrangle of lawn surrounded by beautifully preserved
and reconstructed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century almshouses,
nearly every one fronted with flower-filled gardens. A restored wooden